Smoke in the Glass

by Chris Humphreys

  Lucan laughed too while Ferros stammered, ‘You … you are … ?’

  ‘Yes. His daughter and immortal. It happens sometimes, rarely. My mother wasn’t, alas.’ She took her hand back, gently. ‘So trust me when I say this: there is a way you can die. But you will not want to. Not when you discover so many reasons to live.’

  Ferros wondered again at what was in the ale. He had never felt like this. Because he was looking at the only reason he could ever want to live for ever and yet not find it time enough.

  There was a silence of stares, broken at last by Lucan. ‘My dear, we must send this poor boy to a bed.’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Indeed we must.’

  Ferros found his tongue, and a form of words. ‘Healthy rest. Happy awakenings.’

  They both smiled at the old mother’s phrase. ‘Sleep well, Ferros. Tomorrow your work begins.’

  Graco, the servant, had appeared again, unnoticed. Ferros followed him to the door, resisted the urge to look back, though he felt her gaze upon him. As he circled the stairwell down, he cursed himself. ‘“Happy Awakenings”?’ he muttered. ‘Piss in a pocket!’

  His smile, though, lasted back through the Sanctum, into the basket, and all the way back to the port. Only when he stepped from it did he frown, as the servant led him from the platform towards the Haven Inn and the young woman who awaited him there.

  Back in the room, father and daughter stared at the closed door and did not speak until the echoes of footfalls faded.

  ‘Well, child?’

  ‘He has promise.’

  ‘You think so?’ Lucan clicked his tongue. ‘He struck me as so many from Balbek – bovine, dull, uneducated.’

  ‘And yet did not General Olankios’s letter speak of a natural soldier, gifted in all the ways of war? Of tracking, hunting. Killing.’ She moved to the tray of drinks, poured herself a glass of ice wine. ‘Did we want a wit or a warrior?’

  ‘You know what we want. And we both know that we have not much time to get it.’ He went to the desk, picked up the parchment he’d been reading when Ferros first arrived. ‘Olankios also writes of a woman, possibly a wife. The servant who brought the letter said she arrived with Ferros on the boat.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Might she not interfere with your plans?’

  Roxanna laughed. ‘When has a wife ever stood between me and my desires?’

  ‘True. Though he is from Balbek. Loyal, dependable—’

  ‘Ah, but Father, you did not feel his lips upon your hand.’ She looked back to where they’d stood before the fire. ‘I saw something different in him. Unformed, yes. But there and waiting to be shaped. Beyond his courage, his skills, his loyalties. And he was handsome, no? That broken nose? Those scars? Rough – but I have never concerned myself with that. Indeed—’

  Lucan, who had not minded his daughter’s ways in over two hundred years, felt the faint echo of an old anger now. ‘I do not wish to know,’ he said sharply. ‘Do what you must. Just keep your desires to yourself.’

  Roxanna looked at him, one teased and painted eyebrow rising. ‘Oh, I will, Father,’ she said. ‘Which reminds me.’ She lifted her glass, drained off the ice wine. ‘I must go and indulge another.’

  Lucan stepped towards her. ‘Tonight? You go to destroy Maltarsus tonight?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It is all arranged?’

  ‘All. The workers’ noble leader is even now being made drunk by my agents. Not too drunk. Enough to leave him … amenable to my charms. Or rather, the charms of the famous courtesan Andropena.’

  Something of that echo of irritation from before remained in Lucan. ‘Isn’t it easier just to kill him? Why fuck him?’

  ‘If it was easier, I would.’ She set down the glass. ‘But we do not want a martyr to the dock workers’ cause. We want a scandal. We want him disgraced, ruined.’ She smiled. ‘Besides, possessing the body of one as gifted in deviant practices as Andropena is rumoured to be will bring its own rewards. Perhaps I will learn something new.’ She laughed, adding, ‘Though I cannot imagine what.’ She moved to the doorway, stopped in it, turned back. ‘Perhaps what I learn will be the very thing that makes Ferros fall entirely. For there’s always something, isn’t there? You remember that well enough, don’t you, Father?’

  She left. Lucan stared at the doorway for a long moment, then turned back to the desk to re-read the letter from Olankios. Roxanna was right – the boy, for all his ox-like responses, sounded promising. And she was also right in this – they didn’t need another poet like Streone. They needed a blade.

  Though she had raised herself from the fish-gutting tables of the docks, and was as strong as the ropes she used to bind her clients, the harlot Andropena was no harder to possess than anyone else. There was brief shock and a briefer struggle when Roxanna barged her way in, dissolving into the whore. It was the workers’ hero, Maltarsus, who was the most surprised, for Andropena was on top of him at the time and seemed just briefly to flag in her efforts, to sink down with a cry of desperation, not passion. But when she rose up again there was new fire in her eyes, and she flung herself from him to return with the snares and bindings that were her trademark.

  In forty years of marriage he had never betrayed his wife. But when their ninth child had died of the sweating sickness one year before, Marya had turned to the gods to preserve the other eight. She would have no more, nor indulge in the act that could create them. It was her sacrifice and he thought it would be his, switching all his energies to the cause of the dock workers whose leader he’d become. The strike he’d organised was bringing concessions. The immortals in their Sanctum were about to crack; rumour was they would give in tomorrow. But when Andropena offered to reward him, because she believed in the cause too, seeing as she was a daughter of the docks, and having drunk rather more than his usual in anticipation of tomorrow’s victory, he’d found it impossible to resist her.

  It was only when he was stripped, bound, gagged and Andropena was whipping him that he wondered if he’d made a mistake. When she mounted him again, he reconsidered that. But he was only certain, utterly and finally, when his brothers-in-law burst into the room, their sister, his wife Marya, in their midst.

  It took them some time to free him from the clever bonds, the tie-er having vanished, but by then it was too late. For his marriage. For his reputation. For his cause.

  From a shadowed doorway opposite the tavern, Roxanna watched the furore through Andropena’s eyes. She could possess a body for a day and a night, longer than any other immortal she knew, even Lucan. But she wasn’t especially enjoying this experience. The whore was diseased, which was hardly surprising, and parts of her ached. But it was her mind that disturbed the most, filled with a bitterness Roxanna had rarely encountered before. She remembered how surprised she’d been when she first possessed another, hadn’t imagined that other people could harbour and retain such anger, such enmities, such … self-loathing. On the rare times she doubted herself, or her actions, or her morals, she moved rapidly to thoughts, then actions. Fucking was good for doubts. Killing was better.

  These people bursting now from the tavern with their wails, their fury, their sense of betrayal? Why didn’t they simply choose what pleased or profited them then act upon it?

  As she would.

  Satisfied that all had gone to plan, Roxanna headed for the docks. The nearer the water, the rougher the taverns. She knew she’d find some playmates there to try some of Andropena’s skills upon. She’d learned early that it was pointless possessing someone unless you drained them of their specialised knowledge. And this whore’s knowledge, while limited to one arena of life, was very specialised indeed.

  As she walked, she smiled, remembering earlier in the evening and another man’s touch. Ferros’s lips on her hand had been a sweet caress. It had stirred a memory of her first male lover, Chiros, who had
been as inexperienced as she, and twice as gentle. He’d been beautiful – and, for three hundred years now, dust in the wind.

  She stopped before a crudely made door, and sighed. She knew from his kiss, from his eyes, that this soldier would want something different from her. She also knew that she would become whatever he required. For a time.

  Not tonight though. Pushing open the tavern door, she grinned at the wind-whipped sailors and hard-handed dockers who looked up at her entrance. ‘Evening, boys,’ she said, and slammed the door behind her.

  5

  The Raid

  The serpent-prowed ships burst through the dawn mist.

  It was only because he’d been awake most of the night examining the killer’s body and unable to sleep afterwards that Luck was walking the cliffs at that hour. Reaching to the elk horn at his waist that all by decree must carry, he brought it to his lips and blew the four-note alarm.

  The first ship grounded, leaned. On its one sail a dragon, woven in gold, roared. Its two eyes were stars, it clutched four more, one in each of its talons, while a last one was impaled upon the tip of its barbed tail.

  Seven. The raiders were from the Seven Isles. Not Askaug’s closest enemy, not their furthest either. As he kept sounding his notes, he saw a huge, familiar shape drop from the ship into the water. ‘Stromvar,’ he groaned. Of course the Lord of the Seven Isles would be first ashore, a god seeking what all gods sought: gold and glory.

  His call found its echo almost immediately. One horn, three, five. The warriors and gods of Askaug might have been sleeping off the effects of the spring feast but Death had come to their town and they roused to meet him.

  ‘Shit!’ Lowering his horn, Luck hobbled back to the snow-choked path as fast as his weaker leg would let him. ‘Not now. Not now!’

  He lurched through the arming men and women, made for the hall. He found his brother-gods within it, arming too. ‘Luck!’ Bjorn yelled, all harm from last night’s mead dispelled by battle fever. ‘Are you going to fight this time?’

  ‘No. Hovard, we must talk.’

  ‘Talk?’ His elder finished strapping the cross-belts across his chest which held the quiver of javelins on his back, then picked up his short axe and waved it at the sounds coming from beyond the hall – battle horns, shouting. ‘They, whoever they are, have not come to talk.’

  ‘It’s Stromvar. He—’

  ‘Stromvar? That boar-faced bastard?’ Bjorn tipped back his head and yelled in joy. ‘He killed me the last two times. He’s mine. Leave him to me, Hovard. I demand it!’

  ‘He’s yours.’

  ‘No. Both of you, listen. We need him—’

  ‘Need him on my point.’ Bjorn hefted Sever-Life, his lean and supple sword, and swirled it through the air. ‘Though perhaps I’ll slice him a dozen times first.’ He swung low, cut high. ‘Here! Here!’

  ‘Quiet!’ The ferocity of Luck’s shout halted even Bjorn’s swinging. ‘You know what happened here last night. That … stranger, trying to kill Einar.’

  ‘As I will kill Stromvar.’

  ‘It’s different. You’ll kill him, and he’ll be reborn in hours. He’ll kill you next time. Hundreds of years of that. Killing. Being killed. Being reborn. And meanwhile mortals die around us for this … sport,’ he spat the word, ‘while their families weep—’

  ‘Weep yet know they have gone to glory in the mead hall of the gods. Where they too are immortal.’ Bjorn picked up his shield. ‘It is our way, brother, and has always been so. Why are you questioning it now?’

  ‘Ways change. Must change. If what I’ve seen in my dreams, in the mirror of water and the cast of stones is true, we are going to need every warrior, man, woman and god, here and alive.’ He thumped his fist upon the table. ‘I told you last night – the gods are being killed!’

  ‘And your proof is the attack on Einar?’ Hovard threw up his arms. ‘One god. One time.’

  ‘I think you need to listen, my love.’

  They all turned – to Freya, standing in the doorway. Like the men, she was in breastplate and helm. Instead of shield and axe though she held a bow. ‘Luck told me some of this last night. Hear his thoughts.’

  Hovard looked past her. ‘The fight?’

  ‘I’ve seen the mothers and the young into the caves. The war maidens are armed and gone to the gate. It is being held. The enemy are bringing a ram up from the beach but that will take some time. You have that. Listen.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Luck turned back to Hovard. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you until I was more certain. Now I have no choice. Because of last night.’ He put two fists on the table, leaned. ‘That face I saw in the smoky glass? It was the face of evil – but it was also the face of a man. He sent the one who nearly killed Einar. He has sent others who were not thwarted. We are being weakened, slowly and surely. I do not know why yet. But I know that to deal with what is to come we must be united. Not just Askaug, and the west.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘All Midgarth.’

  Hovard stared, silent. It was Bjorn who yelled. ‘United? Midgarth? That has never happened. Never could. We fight each other. Gods and men, brother, this is what we do!’

  ‘It has happened. You know it has, for you know your history.’ He spoke to Bjorn but kept his gaze fixed on Hovard. ‘Haakon the King.’

  ‘Not history! One who was neither god nor man but both? Who laid down the Laws then vanished into the mists?’ Bjorn snorted. ‘A myth to be told on a winter’s night – like the coming of Gudrun Gift-Bearer. Though not even as good a story as that one.’

  ‘Perhaps the time has come for us to start believing in myths again,’ Luck said, his eyes not leaving his eldest brother, adding softly, ‘and in a king.’

  Hovard stared back. ‘That is a lot to draw from dreams and stones and a face in smoke, brother. A change in the whole world.’

  ‘Better that, brother, than the loss of the whole world.’

  ‘Believe in him, my heart,’ Freya said. ‘I do.’

  Hovard looked from his love to Bjorn, and lastly to Luck. ‘What would you have me do now? With the enemy at our gate?’

  ‘I have a plan.’ He smiled. ‘And the enemy is exactly where we want him.’

  ‘Does this plan involve fighting? Please say it does.’

  Luck turned to his aggrieved brother-god. ‘It does, Bjorn. Just not killing.’ He leaned down to rest his elbows on the table. ‘For this is what we must do.’

  Stromvar the Dragon sat on a rock on top of the low hill that faced Askaug’s gates. He was excited.

  Today is going to be a good day, he thought. The tala stones cast by his seer said so. His guts said so, his stool that morning firm and long. Even if they had not surprised Askaug because of some fucking sentry on the cliffs – who posted a lookout the morning after the spring feast, for the gods’ sake? – he knew his enemies at the gate ahead of him would be suffering the feast’s effects. He’d denied his own warriors their celebration and some had grumbled. But a wonderful speech he’d made as they rowed had reassured them. For there’d be plenty of feasting in Askaug when they took it that day.

  And take it he would. He’d brooded on it throughout the long winter which did not want to end, which was already colder than any he could remember. He was fed up with the Seven Isles. He was fed up with mere raids. Why should he and his people huddle on barren rocks in the ocean, which the winter storms swept over without hindrance, while the Askaugers sheltered beneath cliffs and with unlimited wood from their forest hinterland to burn? He was fucked if he was going to do that any more. He would take Askaug, rule its people, blend them with his own – and the resident gods could have the Isles if they wanted. See how they liked them.

  The resident gods! Another reason to feel happy. He’d killed that stag-fucker Bjorn in their last two encounters. Only once before over all the years had any god killed another three times. He was tha
t god. But it was more than a century since his triple defeat of Petr the Red. He was confident he would equal that today with Bjorn. But he had greater ambitions still. Take the town and he’d take Hovard too. Kill him as well. A brace of gods in one day? They’d sing about that in fires across Midgarth for a score of years at least.

  Stromvar laughed on another thought. Why stop at two? Why not three? Kill the elder gods and Luck would be easy prey. He wasn’t even a fighter. Three gods in one day would make a song they’d sing for a century. Though he’d make sure his skald amended the song’s words a little. Made Luck as fierce a warrior as the other two instead of the useless little cunt he was.

  A warrior ran up. ‘The ram is in position, lord.’

  Stromvar looked down at the ram from his rock, then over at the gates. The tower above them did not have as many warriors in it as before. Cowardly fuckers had probably noted the size of his ram and run off.

  ‘Attack,’ he grunted.

  The warrior ran down, took up his position at the ram’s butt end, still in the shelter of its sloped wooden roof. At his command, archers fanned out, their shield men beside them. At another shout, all began to run forward. The ram, pushed by twenty men, started slowly, then picked up speed.

  Stromvar lifted a buttock off the rock and farted. May need to vent another turd, he thought. And no doubt it will be just as firm and long as the first one.

  In the square behind the gates, all was ready. Hovard, in the tower, had sent back the guards, in threes and twos. As soon as the ram began its run forward, he waved off the few who remained, ducked under the first flight of arrows, and descended the stairs. He’d observed the strength of Stromvar’s forces, twice as many as he’d bring on a common raid. If he was to guess, his old enemy was there for conquest, not goods or glory, especially as he was striking the day after the feast. You had better be right, little brother, he thought, glancing up at the balcony of the house to the left of the gates as he ran across the square. And your plan had better work.